Beyond the Skateboarding Panda
Greetings, Pulse Subscribers!
Big news in the world of artificial intelligence this week, including:
Bigger, better, brainier chatbots
Pricing with AI
Collaborative coding
Flexible warehouse bots
And of course, some gen AI content—“Beyond the Skateboarding Panda” from our Bain experts
All that plus a better way to mine your data and a chat with the co-founder and CEO of retail tech leader Zipline, Melissa Wong.
Let’s do this!
Startup Deals
AI Assistants | As OpenAI’s GPT series continues to evolve its large language models (LLMs), “traditional” AI chatbots (you know, from three years ago) are being replaced by next-level AI assistants. A new entry into this field is Mindverse, a Singaporean startup building an API that will allow businesses to create smart agents with vertical memories and different skill sets. The Mindverse AI assistant can absorb a retailer's inventory data and talk to customers like a human. For example, it can explain the differences between products or what sets a particular item apart. The shopping agent can also suggest alternatives if the user isn’t happy with its first recommendations—meaning the bot can learn from real-time conversations. With early users including an undisclosed platform inside Alibaba’s ecosystem and the a16z-backed fashion startup Cider, Mindverse recently closed a $10 million Series A funding round.
Vector Database | What good is a mountain of new data if you can’t use it effectively? Pinecone is a vector database that effectively organizes unstructured data (e.g., customer interactions with a chatbot or social media posts) so users can leverage it to improve their AI and customer experience. Pinecone allows users to search and retrieve wide-ranging data sets quickly and accurately. Retailers specifically can use Pinecone to enhance customer experience by activating recommendation systems, which personalize suggestions for customers based on their previous purchase history and behavior. Beyond pleasing customers, Pinecone can help optimize supply chain management by powering the AI models used to predict demand and improve inventory management. Pinecone recently raised $100 million in Series B funding backed by all-star investors like ICONIQ, Menlo Ventures, and a16z, on a $750 million valuation.
Price Planning and Prediction | How much is that doggy in the window? Luca knows. The San Francisco-based startup offers AI-powered pricing and prediction tools for retailers. What sets Luca apart is its pricing engine, which takes in retailers’ historical sales and inventory data—as well as competitor signals—to forecast the sales performance of products at different price points. Luca helps users move away from fragmented decisions in spreadsheets across inventory, discounting, and revenue teams and instead unifies them into smart configurations and actionable insights. Once its pricing recommendations are approved, Luca keeps tabs on sales volume, looking for undesirable trends. That said, Luca is not a dynamic pricing platform. Instead, it’s a platform that helps human decision-makers create a robust pricing strategy by turning a sea of data into clear recommendations with high levels of explainability. Luca recently closed a $2.5 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures.
AI Coding Collaboration | Even the best programmers make mistakes, and no one can remember everything. That’s where Ghostwriter, Replit’s generative AI for software development, comes in. Ghostwriter aids with coding in any programming language—no setup required. Fully cloud-based and in-browser, the Ghostwriter platform can speed up developer productivity by more than 30%, Replit claims. This is possible by allowing users to chat with a coding AI directly in their IDE and take advantage of a proactive debugger with full awareness of their project’s code. Think of it like ChatGPT, but specialized for coding. With over 22 million users in 200-plus countries, Replit recently closed a $97 million financing round at a valuation above $1 billion.
Warehouse Helper Bots | Robots in the warehouse are nothing new these days. As retailers look to cut costs, automation just makes sense. But Robust.AI offers a unique—and flexible—warehouse bot solution to meet this need: Carter, an autonomous warehouse cart, which is supported by Grace, the software that runs it. While they can function like most bots, navigating autonomously or following workers around after a quick setup, human employees can grab Carter’s handles and move them around manually. By enabling what Robust calls “collaborative productivity,” Carter and Grace can increase warehouse throughput, boost employee retention, and support dynamic workflows for material handling with minimal setup. Robust recently announced a $20 million Series A-1, led by Prime Movers Lab.
Essential Reads
Zipline is an operations platform for retail that brings together frontline communications, task management, learning, resources, and insights to help teams work more efficiently. Zipline co-founder and CEO Melissa Wong, in conversation with Andre Fernandes, Bain's expert partner on the Venture Ecosystem team, shares stories about her experience on the front lines of retail and how they led her to create the Zipline platform.
Learn how a customer service obsession led to an industry-changing platform here.
“Sure,” you might be thinking, “generative AI is cool, but what can it do for me?” Well, Mikey Vu and Samantha Hamilton at Bain have your answer. In this essential read, the team looks at how retail can use generative AI to improve personalized marketing, boost customer engagement and transform service, streamline operations and productivity, and provide customer and industry insights. Besides showing that generative AI can do more than create silly pictures of pandas on skateboards, this read makes the case that gen AI could be the future of retail.
Read “Beyond the Skateboarding Panda” here.
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